George W. Hill | The Flying Fleet / 1929

something special

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Schaver (screenplay, based on a story by Frank Wead and Byron Morgan, with titles by Joseph Farnham), George W. Hill (director) The Flying Fleet / 1929

 

I have to admit that upon reading about George Hill’s The Flying Fleet of the same year, I almost skipped it. Commentators described it—rightfully so—as being more like a hiring commercial for the US Navy, which sanctioned the making of this film. And the film focuses mostly on two students training from the Naval Academy to San Diego and Pensacola, Florida as they and four of their close friends all attempt to “get their wings,” allowing them to become Navy pilots—allowing little room for any suggestion of feelings, let alone psychological revelations.

      Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times didn’t help the matter, arguing “the story is sometimes quite a bit too melodramatic,” although he appreciated the “thrilling stunts,” and “spending sequences devoted to an airplane carrier.” More recently critic Dennis Schwartz demurred that at least "the authentic looking plane stunts and test pilot sequences make the film a winner, as the tepid romance story flags."

     The major adventure of the film involves an early Navy flight from San Diego to Honolulu, originally assigned to Tommy Winslow (Roman Novarro) to pilot, but when he, in zealous reaction their competitive maneuvers, buzzes his partner after he lands (a scene quite similar to that in Capra’s Flight) is reassigned to that friend Steve Randall (Ralph Graves) whose plane crashes due to weather, the film shifts. The search for him by his best friend Tommy becomes the major and closing event of the work. So on the surface, at least, there is not a great deal of even possible gay context.

        And much of the rest of the films concerns how the other three friends are excluded from the goal sought by all five of them. Dizzy (Edward J. Nugent), arriving back to the dorm after hours drunk the night before graduation, is expelled from the Academy. Kewpie (Sumner Getchell) panics on his first flight, forcing his instructor to knock him out to regain control of their trainer biplane. And Tex (Carroll Nye) loses control and crashes evidently losing his life. Specs is rejected as a pilot because of his sight, although he does become a navigator who is terribly hurt in Steve’s crash, and knowing he’s about to die, purposely slips off to his death from the plane’s wing where Steve and two other airmen wait to be rescued.

      The only obvious love aspect of the film involves a girl, Anita Hastings (Anita Page) who both Steve and Tommy meet in San Diego, and almost the rest of the film is motivated by their attempts to exclude the other from her company while both attempt to court her. It was far too early in film history for the writers to truly engage their characters in a true ménage à trois, but as in Flight, feelings are hurt and consequences arise from their competitive interactions regarding this young girl who seems unable to make up her mind about which one she likes better. But as in Flight, their heterosexual romance is primarily a ruse to cover up the real center of this film’s romantic concerns: their deep love for one another.

      When they first catch a glimpse of Miss Hastings waterskiing, one says to the other “Seafood.” Now that may be a common heterosexual term men apply to women in the water, but I’ve never heard it, and it is far more commonly applied by homosexual men to Navy boys.

      In Flight, however, that sort of love was demonstrated simply through the two central male’s physical contact, while here—particularly since the narrative was based on the war hero Frank Wead’s story—screenwriter Richard Schaver and director George Hill coded that relationship through bits of language and images, like the “seafood” allusion, that could in context be read on two levels. For example, quite early in the film when their return to get out of the Navy Whites in their everyday uniforms, Steve, almost a self-enchanted poseur as Graves plays him, opens his closet to reveal a wall plastered with headshots of beautiful women, bragging of how even the photos will miss his daily bodily appearances, he strips of his shirt and sits down on the bed to have his roommate Tommy pull off his pants. Tommy then sits down to have Steve pull off his pants as well. Presumably, this action represents a daily one, with nothing particularly being made of it. But unless I am missing some traditional military manner of dressing, it appears strange and somewhat humorous, forcing us as it does to realize that they are actively undressing one another.

     Although there is none of the homoerotic wrestling we witness in Flight, when after the pre-graduation celebration Tommy is forced to serve officer of day and Steve and Dizzy return late drunk as I describe above, their friend attempts to quiet them both down so that the Officer in Charge will not hear them. When Steve will not play along, like Panama in Flight, he slugs out his friend and carries him off to a hidden corner to take care of Dizzy, who does get caught, before lifting Steve’s body for its out-of-sight corner to return him to his bed. As in Flight, you might again describe this as a true case of “rape” if you were to use the archaic meaning.

     They begin to trick one another with regard to Anita in little ways, beginning with a series of gentle bashes and maulings of one another’s face as they both sit both with the arms around her. Soon after Steve convinces Mrs. Hastings that his friend Tommy, who at the moment is wooing Anita in the garden, is a famed bridge player who advises the Admiral, she accordingly pulling him away from Anita so that Steve can take his place. Tommy watches Steve rush off to the girl in a taxi, while he having procured his own auto speeds away to her faster that the taxi can maneuver the traffic.

     It culminates on the beach where Steve steals Tommy’s pants from his changing room, forcing his competitor to catch an ice cream wagon back to base and slip into his barracks dressed only in his underwear—an act observed by officers for which he gets reprimanded. Steve meanwhile not only gets time alone with Anita but wrecks Tommy’s car upon his return, insisting (in a lie) that he has asked her to marry him and that she has accepted. This time Tommy is sincerely hurt, but the sensitive viewer might wonder if it isn’t because he fears losing his dear friend more than the losing Anita. Read it as you will, the director and writer seem to suggest. But it is this event which ends in the royal battle between the two in the sky with Tommy, after forcing down his buddies’ plane, nosedives him, resulting in his losing the prestigious flight to Honolulu.

     But let us scroll back to the moment he first gets the news that he been assigned to that flight.

 

     Tommy Winslow: [to Steve, after hearing he is to fly to Hawaii—jumps in Steve's arms]

                                                 Oh boy! Kiss me while I'm conscious!

     You might read one such incident and imagine that you’re reading into the script but when several incidents like these occur, and the final action is devoted to Tommy, against all odds, saving the friend who has flown that fateful moment of near death instead him you have to admit that the two have something special going on in their lives—particularly when the only way Tommy can rescue Steve is to set his own plane on fire, sending out a signal to the nearby USS Langley, while parachuting down into the ocean to be with and hug closely his special friend.

      Back aboard the hospital ship, the meet up again with Miss Hastings, who chooses finally between one or the other (presumably Tommy), but it matters no more than in Mozart’s Così fan tutti, who she marries. The men are already in a relationship far deeper than the one she will attempt to claim as the writer’s and director’s required nod to a heteronormative ending. Besides the two gay boys of this film make a much more beautiful couple that Anita Page does with either of them.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).